Cookies Policy

This Cookies Policy sets out how The Original Cottage Company uses cookies when you access The Original Cottage Company website or one of the locally branded websites.

The Original Cottage Company may change its policy from time to time as required and keep it up-to-date by amending this document. You should check this document periodically to ensure that you are aware of any recent changes.

What is a cookie?

A cookie is a small text file received and stored by your browser. Information in the cookie makes it possible for a website to recognise a visit by a specific browser installation and thus to send individualised information to this installation. A cookie can contain text, numbers, dates etc. but it does not hold any personal information. A cookie is not a program and it cannot contain a virus.

Why do we use cookies?

We use cookies to improve the user’s experience of the website and to gather information about the use of the site. Our website uses cookies to help provide personalized ads, analyse our traffic, and provide you with a variety of social media features. This information may be shared with our advertisers and analytics department, where it may be combined with other information you've given to our website. This helps us make the site more personal for you and allows our team to make our website more effective. No personal information is being collected.

What is the lifetime of a cookie?

A cookie’s lifetime varies depending on the purpose for which it has been created. Some cookies disappear as soon as the browser is shut down (temporary or session cookies) while others can live on for several months (permanent cookies). Many providers specify a 12 or 24 months lifetime on advertisement, statistics and contents related cookies.

Permanent cookies with a specified lifetime will have a new expiration date set each time the site to which the cookie is related is revisited.

How do I avoid cookies?

If you do not wish to receive cookies, you can select a browser and set it to block some or all cookies, delete existing cookies from your computer’s hard disk drive or in some cases issue a warning before any new cookie is downloaded. Please consult your chosen web browser’s Help function for instructions on how to do this.

You can always force immediate deletion of the cookies on your computer either during, or at the end of, a browser session. Please consult your chosen web browser’s Help function for instructions on how to do this.

Cookies used on this website

We make a distinction between cookies sent by our website, (first party cookies) and those sent by the website of one of our partners, e.g. Google Analytics (third party cookies). In most browsers it is possible to define settings that independently control the acceptance of each type of cookie on the computer.

We use cookies for the following purposes:

Strictly necessary cookies. These are cookies that are required for the operation of our site. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our site.

Analytical cookies. They allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our site when they are using it. This helps us to improve the way our sites work, for example, by ensuring that users find what they are looking for easily.

Functionality cookies. These are used to recognise you when you return to our sites and to embed functionality from third party services. This enables us to personalise our content for you, greet you by name, remember your preferences.

Advertising cookies. These cookies record your visit to our sites, the pages you have visited on our sites and others and the links you have followed. We will use this information to make the advertising displayed to you more relevant to your interests. We may also share this information with third parties for this purpose.

Social media cookies. These cookies are used to provide an improved experience when linking to social media sites from our sites.

If you would like a full listing of the cookies in use, please contact us at the address given below.